Blender Internal Animation Render Crashes with New Font
Answering My Own Question:

Blender is short on official documentation ... it appears that free type fonts are supported and of those Blender can be picky about fonts with ligatures, or connections between letters.

So far all the fonts from http://www.dafont.com, recommended on that site, that I have tried worked.  That said I've only tried 4 that were very close to the original. 

With that information I've been able to BI render the animated title sequence.